THE ROPPONGI STALKER (A True Crime Short)

Anthony Bruno

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In Brief

Bruno takes the reader into the tangled world of Tokyo’s sex trade where a charming serial rapist and killer preyed on young women to satisfy his deviant sexual desires. The wealthy playboy had a taste for young Caucasian women. He stalked them, lured them on dates, then drugged and raped them. After two women died, he eluded justice for a decade.

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Overview

When his last victim was found, she was buried in a cave, her dismembered limbs wrapped in plastic garbage bags, her head encased in a block of concrete. The tall blond 21-year-old from the United Kingdom had worked in a Tokyo hostess bar. The killer was a Japanese playboy/real-estate developer with a taste for young gaijin women. He had stalked Tokyo’s sex districts for years, paying for the company of modern-day geishas, then inviting his favorites on dates, drugging them, and raping them while he videotaped what he called his “conquest play.” He eventually became so adept at using date-rape drugs most of his victims never knew what had happened to them.

But something went terribly wrong with the English girl. Investigators would discover that eight years earlier he had killed a young Australian beauty with an accidental overdose of chloroform while raping her. He was finally caught thanks to the bulldog tenacity of the English girl’s father, but the families of his foreign victims never anticipated the odd laws that govern the Japanese criminal justice system. It would take ten years before the case was resolved and the atrocities committed by “the beast with a human face” were fully revealed.

Veteran crime writer Anthony Bruno has investigated many serial offenders in his writing career, interviewing murderers and the cops and prosecutors who put them behind bars. He has written more than 50 articles for Time Warner’s Crime Library and 14 published crime-related books. His publishers include Amazon Kindle, Bantam Dell, Forge, HarperCollins, iUniverse, RuggedLand, and St. Martin’s Press. His full-length book, The Seekers: A Bounty Hunter’s Story with Joshua Armstrong, was nominated for an Edgar Award.

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Foreword by Marilyn Bardsley

Huntington Hartford, heir to the huge A&P grocery store fortune, railed against the curse of hereditary wealth, which, he said, can cause people to become irresponsible and alienated from humanity. The curse seems universal, regardless of cultural differences. A striking example is the disturbing similarity between Japan’s Joji Obara and America’s Andrew Luster. Obara was heir to a real estate fortune; Luster was an heir to the Max Factor cosmetics fortune. Both were playboys with no real sense of industry or responsibility. Both saw themselves as entitled and above the law. Both used their money to attract beautiful women, then drugged and raped them while they were unconscious. Both memorialized their crimes by videotaping the assaults. One difference was that not all of Obara’s victims lived.

Anthony Bruno’s interest in Japanese culture began when he started to study the Japanese martial art aikido 25 years ago. Now a fourth-degree black belt (yondan in Japanese) and an instructor, he considers himself still a student. Bruno’s understanding of Japanese culture, combined with his expertise in violent criminal behavior, gave him a unique insight into this case, making him the perfect writer to tell the story. He has written extensively on organized crime in the U.S. and on the Yakuza, the Japanese version of the Mafia. Bruno wrote virtually all the stories about organized crime on Time Warner’s Crime Library.

Bruno is the author of the non-fiction book The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer and the co-author of The Seekers: A Bounty Hunter’s Story with Joshua Armstrong, which was nominated for an Edgar Award. The Iceman is set to become a major feature film starring James Franco, Benicio Del Toro, and Boardwalk Empire‘s Michael Shannon as The Iceman. Bruno is also the author of the crime novels Seven (based on the Brad Pitt-Morgan Freeman movie), Bad Guys, Bad Blood, Bad Luck, Bad Business, Bad Moon, Bad Apple, Devil’s Food, Double Espresso, and Hot Fudge.

His thriller, Bleeders, and coming-of-age novel, The Temptations of St. Frank, are Kindle originals.

Praise

“Anthony Bruno’s The Roppongi Stalker takes you deep into the strange culture of Japan’s sex and entertainment industry, where a mysterious and wealthy serial rapist and killer preys on the foreign women who work there as ‘hostesses.’

This is a gripping and weird tale of true crime gold, told by a master of the genre.” –Troy Graham, Philadelphia Inquirer

Press Kit

About Anthony Bruno

Anthony Bruno has a deep interest in Japanese culture and has studied the Japanese martial art, aikido, for over 25 years. Among his many Crime Library articles is a widely reprinted piece on the Yakuza, the Japanese mafia. In The Roppongi Stalker, he takes the reader into the tangled world of Tokyo’s sex trade where a charming serial rapist and killer preyed on young women to satisfy his deviant sexual desires.